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Rice and Spinach Casserole

I was intrigued at how many casseroles were in this month’s Martha Stewart Living (it doesn’t seem like a typical Martha thing really) and I’ve been enjoying trying them out. Last night I made the Rice and Spinach Casserole (page 47 of January Living). I love spinach and I love rice.

This was pretty easy to put together. You cook sliced zucchini, garlic and scallions in a pan until it’s soft. You take that out and cook spinach until it wilts. I didn’t have enough fresh spinach on hand and added some frozen spinach that I thawed and it was perfectly fine – you could definitely skip this step and just use some thawed frozen spinach. Next you add fresh basil to the spinach and cook that down a little. I didn’t have any fresh basil so I just used dried. I’m sure fresh would have tasted much better, but this was an adequate substitute (I know Martha would never agree!).

Next you mix up ricotta and eggs (I substituted Eggbeaters for some of the whole eggs). Another admission – I absolutely cannot stand ricotta in anything, ever, so I used cottage cheese. You mix this with the rice and veggies and add some parmesan cheese. You put it in a casserole dish and top with more rice and parmesan.

I really liked this. It had lots of spinach and just enough rice. Usually I believe there can never be enough cheese in things, but this had just enough. It cooked in about 40 minutes and stayed hot when served. I’ll definitely make this again. I think if you wanted to, you could definitely add some chicken or ground turkey to this to make it a complete meal in one dish.

2 Responses

Reading through your post reminded me what else we REALLY didn’t like about this casserole, the basil flavor was too overpowering. We used fresh basil, and it was just too basil-y in the end, and completely overpowered any of the other flavors.
Glad you had more success with the recipes though!